In File Settings if I have "Overwrite existing files" unchecked and try and download a title that is already downloaded I get as expected:
SKIPPING DOWNLOAD, FILE ALREADY EXISTS: ...

The download task though will remove a file that failed to download correctly since for that situation you normally want subsequent tasks to fail as well if the download doesn't complete. Going through check-in history delete after any type of download failure was added way back on 2/18/2010 so it's nothing new/recent.

Here is what I think has changed... Just my experiences and memory and guesses.

Before, if there was a network interruption, kmttg would usually get stuck in the download task. Basically, it would not download anymore, but the timer would still tick. So I might come back from a downloaded file that had a problem and let's say, should have downloaded in a half hour, but at 3 hours, is 3/4 downloaded but not increasing (timer still ticking). I would then cancel the task, the file would be there, I would then rename it and set the tivo to resume downloading around where the network timeout happened.

For example, say I was downloading jon is great.tivo and it hung at 22 minutes of play of 30 minutes. I would cancel and rename it to jon is great part 1 and then use resume download to pick it back up from 22 minutes in the playtime.

The downloading attempts 2,3,4 seems to have happened rather recently, or did not work the way it is now, because I have used the prior protocol many times when network wonkiness caused issues and it has been much more recent than 2010. Maybe the checks for redownloading or whatever have changed or the detection for hung downloads has changed.

I would suggest, especially for big files, that it is much better to be able to pick up where you left off, than to restart as it now does. Or possibly if it has to automatically restart the download, to leave the original file and name the second attempt jon is great 2 for attempt 2, jon is great 3.tivo for attempt 3 or something similar.

That way if there are significant errors, you do not lose the original hard network work done and all the time spent. (I am fine with cleaning up the files or whatever, that is why I leave overwrite off)

Because if you have spotty networks, you might never be able to download a big file. I would much rather have it fail, leave the file and move on and let me sort it out than to automatically try to redownload it and overwrite all the existing work already done.

You can change # download attempts under "Program Options". Perhaps for your case you would prefer to set it to 1 so that there will be no attempts to try again. Still, if kmttg detected there was a problem with the download even with only 1 attempt it will be deleted.

I guess I disagree with leaving behind partial downloads. In no scenario do I want unintended partial downloads which may give you the impression at first that nothing is wrong until you go play it back and discover it's not all there. If file is missing completely then you know something went wrong and to go try again. Especially now that series 4 downloads "resume" option doesn't even work anymore having a partial download becomes totally useless. I can understand where having a series 3 unit it may be somewhat useful to have partial download and then you can figure out where it stopped and do a resume download again to get the rest of it and then edit to put them back together, but that seems like a huge hassle and easier just to try re-download the whole thing.
If your network is so unreliable that this happens all the time then it would be worth pursuing fixing that perhaps by wiring PC to TiVo for downloads instead of using wireless.

I don't have a Slingbox Pro (which uses rec2.pl script) to test with, but the rec350.pl script used with Slingbox 350/500 works for channel changing for me. Comparing the 2 scripts I do see a difference. So perhaps edit the slingbox\rec2.pl script and change:

You can change # download attempts under "Program Options". Perhaps for your case you would prefer to set it to 1 so that there will be no attempts to try again. Still, if kmttg detected there was a problem with the download even with only 1 attempt it will be deleted.

I guess I disagree with leaving behind partial downloads. In no scenario do I want unintended partial downloads which may give you the impression at first that nothing is wrong until you go play it back and discover it's not all there. If file is missing completely then you know something went wrong and to go try again. Especially now that series 4 downloads "resume" option doesn't even work anymore having a partial download becomes totally useless. I can understand where having a series 3 unit it may be somewhat useful to have partial download and then you can figure out where it stopped and do a resume download again to get the rest of it and then edit to put them back together, but that seems like a huge hassle and easier just to try re-download the whole thing.
If your network is so unreliable that this happens all the time then it would be worth pursuing fixing that perhaps by wiring PC to TiVo for downloads instead of using wireless.

Well, isn't that why the log is red and wouldn't that be enough notification that the download was not finished? It might not just be the computer, heck, networks can get cranky for any reason, this doesn't happen all the time, but in the past, it was an easy fix. I just hate to see that the 5 hours spent trying to download would be wasted over and over. Plus, sometimes files get screwed up and will not finish downloading ( who knows why but it happens in tivo world) and I think some of the file is better than nothing in certain cases.

Tivos continuing removal of functionality from the premieres is making me nuts and I am using my HD more than ever because of their stupidity. I cannot see why I cannot schedule shows on my tivo using the app if my ipad is broken, but for some reason, tivo will not let me.

Anyway, I am sure I am not the only one who would like it to just error out and not overwrite when something goes wrong. The HDs are slow to download, it is not like the premieres so 5 hour shows take forever in HD to download and resuming them is preferable to it wiping the file out, and like I said, maybe the detection is different or something, but this change is recent, last few months.

I see your point about partial files, but isn't that the whole reason users get to decide to use the overwrite files option or not? Those who want them overwritten can, but others might not want the partials overwritten for the obvious reasons stated.

I searched the thread and haven't see this question yet, so apologies if it was already asked.

Is there a problem with some show names and adding them to the auto transfers list? Two (admittedly bad) summer shows "Whodunnit?" and "Whose Line is it Anyway?" both have a ? in them and both do not transfer for me automatically. Those are the only two shows (of a LOT of shows) that I've had problems with so wondering if it's an issue with the ? in the show name. I checked the auto.ini file and they're both in there, but they won't downloaded, but do transfer if I do it manually.

I searched the thread and haven't see this question yet, so apologies if it was already asked.

Is there a problem with some show names and adding them to the auto transfers list? Two (admittedly bad) summer shows "Whodunnit?" and "Whose Line is it Anyway?" both have a ? in them and both do not transfer for me automatically. Those are the only two shows (of a LOT of shows) that I've had problems with so wondering if it's an issue with the ? in the show name. I checked the auto.ini file and they're both in there, but they won't downloaded, but do transfer if I do it manually.

Thanks

Yes, since regex matching is used for matching titles the ? if left unescaped will prevent matching, so you will need to escape the ? for those. I've added the following note to the auto_transfers Wiki page:

Quote:

NOTE: For titles that contain special characters such as ? or any other character that has special meaning for Regex you will need to escape it. Thus, for example if you setup an auto transfer for series with title "Whodunnit?" you would actually have to make it "Whodunnit\?" for it to work.

I've added another option under File Settings for next release to give you option to get behavior you want:
"Delete failed downloads" (on by default).

If you want to test it out there's a beta version of kmttg.jar with that option added in this zip file.

Believe it or not, I am having the exact opposite problem. Occasionally, a download will fail to acquire the full recording w/o generating an error. The larger problem is that the particular show that has exhibited this problem is being pushed to a remote TiVo. I record it in both SD (for the push) and HD (for my viewing), so if I know the transfer has not completed successfully, I can try the HD, which so far has been successful. I'm just afraid that at some point I'm not going to find out until it is too late.

Believe it or not, I am having the exact opposite problem. Occasionally, a download will fail to acquire the full recording w/o generating an error. The larger problem is that the particular show that has exhibited this problem is being pushed to a remote TiVo. I record it in both SD (for the push) and HD (for my viewing), so if I know the transfer has not completed successfully, I can try the HD, which so far has been successful. I'm just afraid that at some point I'm not going to find out until it is too late.

Yes, that is nothing new where due to a glitch of some sort the TiVo server just stops serving up the file without any indication of an error, so as far as client goes (kmttg) the download completed without error. It was those problem shows that made the "resume download" option useful (which TiVo "broke" for series 4 units, though broke is not quite accurate as it was never an officially supported feature in the 1st place).

Yes, that is nothing new where due to a glitch of some sort the TiVo server just stops serving up the file without any indication of an error, so as far as client goes (kmttg) the download completed without error. It was those problem shows that made the "resume download" option useful (which TiVo "broke" for series 4 units, though broke is not quite accurate as it was never an officially supported feature in the 1st place).

So far I've asked about transferring a "partially downloaded" show between two Tivo Premieres to get the rest of the show, but the answer I got was that doing so would about double my Tivo charges, as both Premieres would need to be "activated."

Would it be possible to use a Tivo Mini as a second unit to transfer the shows internally - and possibly fix broken Tivo files for PC download? Has anyone tried this and accomplished anything?

Yes, since regex matching is used for matching titles the ? if left unescaped will prevent matching, so you will need to escape the ? for those. I've added the following note to the auto_transfers Wiki page:

Would it be possible to use a Tivo Mini as a second unit to transfer the shows internally - and possibly fix broken Tivo files for PC download? Has anyone tried this and accomplished anything? If that worked then at least I wouldn't need to pay for the TV Guide services twice.

No, as the TiVo Mini streams, it does not transfer. It has no storage unit to which it could be transferred.

I've added another option under File Settings for next release to give you option to get behavior you want:
"Delete failed downloads" (on by default).

If you want to test it out there's a beta version of kmttg.jar with that option added in this zip file.

I completely believe you, you write the code so you should know, but has there been a change to the detection or something? Because it has only been recently that instead of hanging due to network timeout or whatever, that it would try to redownload again. I would say the last few months. Maybe it just had not happened much on my machine or I caught the hang before the detection did and cancelled it before it got a chance to wipe the file, who knows? I comb thru the logs pretty regularly.

Anyway, thank you so much for putting in the Option to not delete the file. These Tour de France stages can be very long, sometimes 6+hours to download, so I would much rather have the part and partial download the rest if something goes wrong than wait another 6 hours. I more than anyone wish that the downloads could be premiere fast, but nope!

Again, thanks for adding in this option, it might not be widely used, but it will be definitely appreciated by those who do use it.

Wow, this is an old, long thread. I guess people just keep adding new questions here instead of creating new threads?

I was wondering about the following:

1) Can KMTTG on the Mac be made to show the VideoRedo section in the configuration tab? If VideoRedo is better than ProjectX (and if not better is at least still under active development), then I'd like to use it via Wine. I currently use wine to use the latest windows version of comskip.exe by pointing to a shell script that passes the arguments and it works great, so I'd like to try the same with VideoRedo, but it isn't even listed in the Mac KMTTG configuration...

2) I'd like to achieve the following with advanced file naming: have the name be different based on whether it's a movie or a TV show. I saw the advanced file naming section and see how it's supposed to work, but I also want it to work with auto sub-folders, but only when it's a TV show. The following doesn't work the way I'd expect:

Am I missing something? Is it possible to get something like that to work? The resulting output puts _ in place of the / even though I don't have the / in quotes and am not trying for it to be a literal string. I want to use it as the folder separator keyword, and I want that in the conditional so it's only used if season and episodeTitle don't equate to null...

Wow, this is an old, long thread. I guess people just keep adding new questions here instead of creating new threads?

I was wondering about the following:

1) Can KMTTG on the Mac be made to show the VideoRedo section in the configuration tab? If VideoRedo is better than ProjectX (and if not better is at least still under active development), then I'd like to use it via Wine. I currently use wine to use the latest windows version of comskip.exe by pointing to a shell script that passes the arguments and it works great, so I'd like to try the same with VideoRedo, but it isn't even listed in the Mac KMTTG configuration...

2) I'd like to achieve the following with advanced file naming: have the name be different based on whether it's a movie or a TV show. I saw the advanced file naming section and see how it's supposed to work, but I also want it to work with auto sub-folders, but only when it's a TV show. The following doesn't work the way I'd expect:

Am I missing something? Is it possible to get something like that to work? The resulting output puts _ in place of the / even though I don't have the / in quotes and am not trying for it to be a literal string. I want to use it as the folder separator keyword, and I want that in the conditional so it's only used if season and episodeTitle don't equate to null...

Thanks for such great software.

1. I don't think any version of VideoRedo works via Wine because it relies heavily on Windows DirectX
2. The keyword to make sub-folders is [/] not just /. I think this template works for what you want to do:
[mainTitle][" (" movieYear ")"]["[/]Season " season]["[/]" SeriesEpNumber][" - " episodeTitle]

1. That's a shame. I just assumed it would work the same way... Oh well...

2. "The keyword to make sub-folders is [/] not just /." I know, but I read "You can define multiple space separated fields within square brackets" and I misunderstood that to mean I didn't need the square brackets around the / if using multiple fields in one block. Thanks for providing an example that works.

I had another question. Well more of a feature request, actually. Comskip doesn't work well to trim the very beginning or ending of shows that don't start at the right time. For instance a show starts 10 seconds after the hour, and there is no commercial between it and the previous show. So I'm using a custom script to use ffmpeg to trim the final encoded mp4. The amount of time that needs to be trimmed is generally consistent on a show/channel basis. For example for me, The Daily Show is 20 seconds past the hour and Love It or List It is 10 seconds.

How hard would it be to enhance the custom command to be different for each auto transfer configuration, the same way you can specify a different comskip.ini override? I'm thinking of simply building one large custom command that uses logic based on the name of the file to determine how much to trim, but I thought a different custom command per auto transfer might make sense...

How hard would it be to enhance the custom command to be different for each auto transfer configuration, the same way you can specify a different comskip.ini override? I'm thinking of simply building one large custom command that uses logic based on the name of the file to determine how much to trim, but I thought a different custom command per auto transfer might make sense...

For something like that you can make a custom encoding profile that calls a script which does the main encoding and calls ffmpeg a 2nd time within the script to do the trimming. i.e. The custom encoding profile can be a script as well, it doesn't have to be a call to ffmpeg or handbrake.

moyekj, is there anyway that kmttg can prevent a mac running Mountain Lion from sleeping? The transfers take a long time and my computer can go to sleep. Apple changed their sleeping behavior in Mountain Lion.

moyekj, is there anyway that kmttg can prevent a mac running Mountain Lion from sleeping? The transfers take a long time and my computer can go to sleep. Apple changed their sleeping behavior in Mountain Lion.

For something like that you can make a custom encoding profile that calls a script which does the main encoding and calls ffmpeg a 2nd time within the script to do the trimming. i.e. The custom encoding profile can be a script as well, it doesn't have to be a call to ffmpeg or handbrake.

Thanks. I hadn't thought of that. KMTTG is so versatile! Thanks again!

Then I remembered I use atMonitor and it has it built in to be able to select a process from the list and pause it with a button.

Tested it and it worked great...

But THEN I thought, "Gee, wouldn't it be cool if KMTTG just had a pause button right there in its GUI to manually pause only the encoding... And perhaps some type of configuration to auto pause at certain times of day..."